[Blows off dust, taps mic. Hello? Is this thing on? I still have this blog!? Phew. Thanks for staying with me despite my neglect, blog. You never know when the Internet is going to piss you off and you're going to need your soapbox back.]
I’m a geek. I’ve suffered repetitive stress injuries from video games. I can’t order a cup of earl grey without adding “hot” and giggling to myself. I get almost 10% of XKCD comic strips!
But I sometimes forget I’m a geek, because I’ve always been the least geeky person in my immediate family. That being said, I have compared my sister’s strategy at playing Settlers of Catan to that of Otto von Bismarck in unifying Germany, so I’m clearly not so much of a black sheep as a dusky gray one.
I assume it is because I never fully embraced my geek identity that I never really had to confront the misogyny among geeks. I knew it was there, I’d get a whiff of it when I’d delve into a new geeky interest (like comic books) and I’d read the experiences of more strongly geek-identified women. But keeping my geekiness at arm’s length from my central identity has let me become sadly complacent about geek misogyny.
Which is why I was foolishly surprised to see the vitriol unleashed upon Gizmodo’s Alyssa Bereznak’s “hit piece” on her Internet dating experience with Magic the Gathering World Champion Jon Finkel. If you don’t want to take the link bait, the post can be summarized as such: Alyssa created an OK Cupid profile, went on a date with a cute hedge-fund guy, learned that he plays Magic the Gathering and is in fact the World Champion. She Googles him and finds out he is Kind of a Big Deal. She goes out on a second date with him, tries to discern how much Magic is a part of his life, discovers the answer is “a lot,” and that is a deal-breaker for her. She advises people to disclose their heavy involvement with geeky subcultures on their online dating profiles, and to “Google the shit” out of prospective internet dates to weed out anyone falling short of that standard of transparency.
Now, that’s my summary of the piece. The first summary I read, following a link from Famous Geeky Woman Felicia Day, was written by another (seemingly Internet famous) geeky woman, Nerdpuddle’s Kiala. It plainly casts Alyssa Bereznek as a simpering moron who is so shallow and superficial you have to use both words even though they are basically synonymous. It left a sour taste in my mouth, even though it sidesteps calling her a bitch or a whore (probably because it is from Alyssa’s perspective).
Kiala’s piece was selected by Buzzfeed as one of the 8 Best Reactions of this particular silicon-dust-up, and it’s the LEAST hostile of the bunch. We’ve got Wikipedia being edited to call her a “shallow bitch.” Then there’s Gizmodo Australia arguing that Bereznek “is making us females look bad.” [Use of the word "females" for "women" is like the whistle of a sexism shell as it hurdles through the air, waiting to blow its misogyny all up in your business] Like the Nerdpuddle post, it fixates on her off-hand reference to being drunk when she set up her OK Cupid profile, obnoxiously cautioning “Any guy will tell you that there’s nothing more unattractive than a drunk girl falling all over the place and having no idea how stupid she looks. ” [Because being attractive to guys is clearly what should guide a woman's choices regarding alcohol consumption, right? Ugh.] It also calls her “shallow” and a “narcissist” and her piece “slanderous.” This woman-written post also avoids calling Bereznek a bitch or a whore, but if you need your fix of that for some reason, please scroll down to the comments. Can’t miss it.
Or you could scroll through this NSFW, NSFHL (that’s Not Safe For Happy Living) meme.
I re-posted the above example because it is offensive but will not drag my blog down to hell with it. Sadly, it is probably in the 90th percentile for non-offensive iterations of the meme. It gets much worse [Remember, NSFW, NSFHL].
Don’t get me wrong: trash-talking a date on the Internet is bad form. Doing this without anonymity is even worse. Basing your talking-of-trash on what is actually a pretty spectacular accomplishment is foolish. Doing this because said accomplishment is geeky is misguided. And doing that to an audience of geeks is absurd. Alyssa Bereznak’s piece is linkbait trash. [Notice I can say that without calling her a whore for making money off her work.]
But the missing step between “well that was a piece of linkbait trash” to this is misogyny. What strikes me as particularly tragic about this parade of sexism in the geek backlash against Alyssa Bereznak is that a big part of what makes her original piece so upsetting is that it is “geek-on-geek violence,” as evidenced by the Simpsons’ cartoon used to illustrate the Nerdpuddle piece. Or as my MtG-enthusiast friend Kaitlin put it, “I think waving one’s own proud geek flag and then persecuting another one is weak sauce. It hurts the geek community. It’s a shitty thing to do.”
But the level of vitriol leveled against Bereznak is even more harmful to the geek community. It justifies the social ostracizing of geeks. A lot of non-geeky women don’t care if you have geeky interests, but do care if you have deep hostility toward their gender. Geek misogyny also scares off a lot of would-be geek women. It’s like a sign posted on the gateway to Geekdom reading “Thar Be Sexist Dragons.”
Kaitlin went on to say, “However, I do not think that [Bereznek's] most egregious faults in this incident are born out of failures to comply with geek solidarity. I think they are born out of doing some pretty shitty things unrelated to being a geek.” I agree. But unleashing tremendous hostility toward women because one woman did something mean is also a shitty thing to do. The Internet’s pillorying of Alyssa Bereznak isn’t just bad for geeks, it’s bad for people. misogyny
And it makes me want to revise my assertion of geekiness at the top of this post. This isn’t a club I want to belong to.
I think a backlash against Alyssa Bereznak was not uncalled for. I think the backlash that occurred was sometimes incredibly gross and weakened the position of the offended party. Geeks! Your PR person sucks. You just turned this person who wrote something really fucking icky (I was tempted to say “offensive”, but then I remembered it was about online dating, not like, genocide. Hey, perspective!) into a quasi-sympathetic figure.
And I think “person” is the keyword here. This didn’t have to be about her being a woman. It could have just been about her being a hateful person. But heaven forbid we miss an opportunity to feel powerful over the mean ladies who said no to your prom invitation by calling another woman a c_nt on the internet. (Or by being mean to the girls at the video game conventions, or drawing all of your comic book heroines as rape victims, etc. etc. ad infinitum)
Of course, there’s also the perspective that the best revenge would have just been to ignore it. I 100% think it is no accident that Alyssa posted this article to Gizmodo. She took a page from Tucker Max’s book, posted some remarks intended to start a flame war, and now she’s way more famous that your typical Gizmodo blogger. That in no way excuses the misogyny that came oozing out of the woodwork. It just, well, serves as a note of how jaded I feel.
While I agree with most of the points you make, I think its important to point out that not only geeks are bothered by this. This episode plays on a number of fears (rejection, ridicule, un-attractiveness to the opposite sex, denigration) all of which play vital roles in the forming “who we are”. Alyssa simply sought the wrong target to belittle. Had this happened to a person whom the average internet reader considers a non-social outcast, I doubt anyone would have batted an eye. This event has simply given a direction for all the pent up anger that exists within most people, and Alyssa wrote herself in as the target.
PS: Is it only misogyny because it was done against a woman? I am sure for most people being publicly ridiculed, similar meme’s exist (easy enough to verify). Even the worst possible misogynist (allegedly) word(s) used in those meme’s I bet I could find attached to a minimum of 10 male figures.
I avoided the linkbait until I saw it come up in half a dozen of my friend’s newsfeeds. And y’know what? I married a guy who has a Magic deck gathering dust somewhere. But would I have been turned off by a guy who goes to Magic tournaments on weekends when he’s out of college? Probably, especially if I wasn’t prepared for it. Was she a total twit in the way she wrote about it? Yes. Which makes it harder to have a real conversation about how much you should or shouldn’t reveal about your geeky hobbies, since all the comments are doing is calling her names. Also, am I the only one that thinks it’s weird that this guy didn’t list it AT ALL when he is the WORLD CHAMPION? That really is hiding a huge part of yourself!
He was the world champion 10 years before the date, when he played. Since then, he took his winnings and started a hedge fund. He may have felt that was more interesting/important. Anyway, Alyssas reaction kindof justified any caution he may have felt.
I have so many jumbled thoughts about this situation. First, I am constantly bothered, annoyed, disgusted and generally pissed off at how blatant the misogyny is in nearly all science fiction and areas of nerddom. The object of my current disgust is Star Trek. We’ve been watching the original Star Trek series because my already geeky 7-year-old daughter is totally into it, and by “into it” I mean that she wants a tricorder and she’s planning to be Spock for Halloween. But every single time we turn this show on, I cringe and want to throw food at the television like I did when I watched the first season of Mad Men. Women doctors are addressed by their first name and their medical opinions must always be confirmed by men (even the evil ones) before anyone will accept the opinion, and once confirmed it becomes Dr. So-and-So’s opinion, not the woman’s. Also, Ship’s OFFICERS wear Playboy Bunny suits to work. I. Hate. It. So. Much.
I would like to think that this is just a dated example of old-timey sci-fi misogyny, but it’s not. It’s like this in every movie, every show, every novel, every comic, every game we watch, read or play.
So I have this to say to the people who create this shit: Knock it off. More women would be geeks and read and buy the things that geeky men and boys love if they didn’t hate being talked down to, insulted, villified, or treated like little girls, whores, or Medusa (or all three at once). There was an awesome panel at Comic Con in 2009 with Signourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana (and a couple of other actresses who do a lot of sci-fi work) about being a woman in sci-fi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPSyEtHCDXc
That said: the Gizmodo article was cruel, stupid, and insulting to geeks and all women. If John Finkel’s game had been chess or poker or some other game that is understood or accepted by mainstream society, would she have ridiculed him for being the CHAMPION OF THE WORLD? Would she have called him out by name as a weirdo? And for the love, what kind of nerd makes PUBLIC fun of someone else’s nerdy pursuits? I can’t even call his interest in Magic a “hobby.” The guy enters tournaments. He is the CHAMPION OF THE WORLD. I wish I was the champion of the world at something.
Perhaps, and I realize I may be reading too much into this situation (*rolls eyes*), but perhaps he doesn’t like to reveal what it is that he is so freaking good at on first dates precisely because he has experienced similar thoughtless, mean, backstabby situations like this one. Perhaps “hedge fund genius” gets him more dates than “King of the Nerds.” Perhaps so much of the name calling from the internet’s geek men is a reaction to the fact that the vast majority of their encounters with girls they were interested in during their formative years kind of resemble what she did here. So while I don’t think the name calling and blatant hate has done anything at all for the sci-fi/nerddom misogyny problem, I do think we need to take a hard look at what started this. A mean, shitty thing done by a woman to a man who had the audacity to ask her out on two dates, and also — just so we’re clear — he told her ON THE FIRST DATE that he was the champion of Magic. So if it was such a deal breaker (rather than just an excuse to publicly humiliate him in order to make a name for herself, which I suspect based on how she wrote her article), why the second date?
Also: dude took her to a play about Dahmer, but it was the fact that he’s brilliant at Magic that was so disturbing? Riiiggghhhttt. I have this sneaking suspicion that her article was a direct result of him (that RICH, hedge fund genius semi-famous WORLD CHAMPION) deciding that two dates with her was plenty. Because that awful piece of drivel smacks of the sort of idiotic acts of revenge spurned women do.
So my comment to women who spread around hate-filled crap after a bad date or getting turned down: Knock that shit off. You’re giving the rest of us a bad name.
I’m also coming at this from my own perspective. I am marrying a died-in-the-wool, D&D playing NERD. When he was in junior high school, he broke up with his first “girlfriend” in a note, which she doctored up to suggest that he was gay and passed around her school. This is why, when he was a senior in high school, this seriously adorable, smart, nice guy was single — because every girl in his school had for 5 years placed him squarely in the “friend zone.” And frankly, that one mean little “joke” has colored his opinions about women and girls, and I am constantly reminding him that we’re not all like that. So yeah. I guess I side with the boys on this particular situation.
Also, sorry for writing a whole blog post in your comments.
Also, *dyed*
This. (From another lady with a deeply nerdy partner.)
I agree with you about the geek misogyny but, in truth, it comes out because these are the men who have been rejected by women like Bereznak all their lives. It doesn’t make it okay that they are attacking her in disgusting sexist ways, but I UNDERSTAND where the vitriol comes from, after years of rejection from women who feel geeks are beneath them… as so perfectly encapsulated by Bereznak’s incredibly public cruelty. I would guess some of the lashing out comes from men who have experienced this directly, many times, from shallow women.
I met my husband on OKCupid. And I had some knock-down, terrible, horrible, cringe/laugh/cry awful internet dates before I met him. A date isn’t bad when we simply didn’t connect (which is what happened in Bereznak’s case). I have had genuinely terrible dates, but I STILL wouldn’t publicly name names and tell stories (except to girlfriends, of course). She behaved in an abhorrent and dehumanizing fashion.
BTW, my brother is literally a world champion of an online game (similar to World of Warcraft.) He got flown out to South Korea to compete and everything. Truly geeky. He still plays occasionally, but law school takes up most of his time (as I imagine hedge funding takes most of John’s time.) It’s a fucking pastime and not definitional. My bother is driven, smart, egalitarian, and really damn attractive (if all my girlfriends are to be believed) and a girl should BE so lucky to date him. Reading about John, all I could see was my brother. Anyone who would reject John for a hobby he excels at and then publicly shame him about on the internet – when he did nothing more than go on two dates and have a nice night – deserves to be ripped to pieces. She shouldn’t have been ripped because of gender, but because it’s a vile petty thing to do.
Also, the Jeffrey Dahmer *musical* was VERY well reviewed and known as a quality off-Broadway quirky indie option. I heard of it here in LA. It’s definitely a niche interest for hip new york liberals, but not a wacko crazy date option.
I don’t know where all this “I choose to be a geek” stuff comes from. Being a geek is not something you choose, it is something that is thrust upon you by people like Bereznek.
Look think back to grade school. Did you wear glasses? Geek. Accidentally wear highwaters? Poindexter. A little too eager to raise your hand in Geometry class? NERD! Enjoy a bracing game of Magic: The Gathering? Dweeb!!!
What does it mean to be a geek? It means you are a low creature, almost down there with the gays and the kids who’s main source of nutrition is the school’s lunch program. Or that one girl who got pregnant when an older man took advantage of her. Marginally cool kids must be vicious in their mockery of Geeks, lest they fall from grace themselves!!!
However, the good thing about grade school is that it ends. Yes, you’ll carry the scars you gained there for the rest of your life, and they’ll harm you in surprising ways for the rest of your life. But it ends. As people like to say to gay kids who suffer unspeakable bullying in grade school, to the point where they consider suicide to make it stop, “It gets better.”
Some people, though, they don’t want it to end. The sweet, arbitrary suffering they got to inflict on others gave them unspeakable pleasure. Much like the Cenobites in Hellraiser they can’t ever, truly, get enough. And of course, these people take their opportunity when presented, and it acts as a triggering stressor for a lot of people.
Don’t cry for Alyssa, she’s positively reveling in this. She’s enjoying the knowledge that once more she’s been able to put those loser geeks, who thought they’d moved beyond this, back in their place! Where they belong!
You make a really interesting point. I definitely was a geek in grade school whether I wanted to be or not. I was more thinking about my adult life. I can read comics and play video games and watch sci fi shows, but choose to stay on the fringes of geek culture. Does that make sense?
Very good article. Yes, there’s misogyny in geek circles, plenty of it. I left WoW in part over running out of people not using the word “rape” and “gay” in their mainstream, more grammatically correct meanings. I hate that crap. Sure, I’m guilty of it, too. I have been a bully, and bullied – so no angel here.
But I still have to throw the bullshit flag on one thing in your article.
If it had been a guy doing this to the female World Champion, and there had been a memebase thing happening calling him “Ugly Douchebag” or similar – would you have called the person who made the meme card a “misandrist”? I don’t think so. I think you’re offering up a double-standard narrative and your over-reacting & jumping to conclusions, not unlike “Anxiety Girl – able to jump from anecdote to conclusions in a single bound!”
“Cunt”, “ugly” and “bitch” are just standard insults toward females (OMG, I wrote “females” – I must be some sort of diehard woman-hater!), just like we call guys “asshole”, “douchebag” or “fuckhead”. The people making the insults may or may not be misogynists, but they’re throwing whatever insults they can because they’re pissed off at her actions, not necessarily because they hate all women. Or females. There’s plenty of misogyny to go around – there’s plenty of legitimate targets for you to criticize, such as people using the word “rape” interchangeably with “pwn” and “win” or “beat”.
According to your logic, since people who use the term “female” obviously hate women – if I call myself a “male” then I hate myself? What? Male is just another term for man, what’s the big deal?
Anyway, good article, with just a tad bit too much conclusion-jumping and one or two complete non-sequiturs.
Calling a woman a “cunt” is not directly analogous to calling a man an “asshole” or even a “dick” or a “prick.” To borrow an expression from Melissa McEwan, that is divorcing slurs from their context. Those insults all derive their power from hatred of women, so using them is sexist and harmful even if it doesn’t come from a place of conscious misogyny.
And you are right that if the genders were reversed I would not have called the person who made the meme a “misandrist.” Here’s a good post on why.
Along the same line of reasoning then it would be misogynistic of me to say that you appear to be overly attached to the whole “women are always victims, men are always the bad guys” thing. Not that that’s not the case in a majority of instances of wrongdoing, esp. violent such, but let’s not leave out the social, financial and other manipulation that goes the other way.
In short, misandrist you are.
While I don’t agree with the nasty comments about her looks (she is just an ordinary girl FFS!) or any of that “Make me a sammich!” crap I feel I have to point out that most of the articles I’ve read in response to this were written by females. When they are constantly under scrutiny from the public as to whether or not they’re a real deal or just eye candy I would imagine they would be disappointed to read articles like the one Ms. Bereznak wrote and have every right to feel like she’s done them all a disservice. That is not Misogyny.
There is also the fact the one linked to was an edited version to be NICER. in the original there is phrases like ” I was lured on a date thinking I’d met a normal finance guy, only to realise he was a champion dweeb in hedge funder’s clothing.”
Or saying he lied on his profile by not mentioning magic. Or ” infiltrated his way into OKCupid dates”
Full thing is here
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/08/my-okcupid-affair-with-a-world-champion-magic-the-gathering-player
Sarah got it right, I think.
I’d just like to add to that excellent post something I’ve noticed in this controversy.
While there has been both deserved and undeserved levels of backlash on this, the people who try to champion Alyssa Bereznek always seem to treat the backlash as if it was coming only from male geeks and nerds. But most of it is from female geeks and nerds, who do not much agree with the notion that being a geek is something that deserves public humiliation to a worldwide audience, or should be branded like a scarlet letter on their social profiles. Lest they commit the heinous sin of going on a date with someone whiteout fully disclosing geekhood first.
Its not 1985. There are a lot of female geeks out there. And there seems to be a lot of blogs out there right now either saying their opinion on the matter is irrelevant or telling them how they should feel about this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3lvuiavUbc
An invitation to Alyssa to learn Magic.
Pretty much agree with first two comments: disliked original piece by Bereznak (which seemed pointless, petty, and cliche: “dude is a giant geek, run away fast and warn others not to date him!!!”). I mean, who *doesn’t* google a potential date, nowadays?
The criticism of her essay started off in a logical and legitimate place and has now descended to where ALL internet criticism seems to eventually go: humanity’s dirty, crap-filled basement.
Would’ve been smarter if the geeks took the high road (and I say that as a geek married to guy who used to play Magic the Gathering and owns an impressive comic book collection).
Sadly, this Alyssa is your typically shallow, modern white woman.
The article was linkbait rubbish. Does she deserve public scorn and disapprobation for throwing her dignity out the window and publicly defaming a blameless person just to get pageviews? Most certainly. Does she deserve nasty remarks against her entire gender? Of course not. Will other unpleasant people make them anyway? Indubitably.
I will add that the vicious misogyny in internet subculture is a monster we have all had a hand in creating. This does not excuse the behavior of those who take part in it, but it does lead us to wonder what kind of experiences these people must have had with people to feel this way.
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